Straight answers, including the unflattering ones

No, and anyone who does is lying to you. Tracing is close to deterministic because public ledgers do not forget. Recovery is not: it depends on whether funds stopped somewhere a court can reach, whether the amount justifies the legal cost, and whether a prosecutor or civil counsel will act. Those are outside our control, so promising an outcome would be dishonest.

Triage is free. Beyond that we charge for analyst time against a written scope agreed before any work starts. We do not charge a fee to release funds, we do not ask for cryptocurrency, and we do not take a percentage of money we did not recover. If a firm's fee is attached to unlocking your balance rather than to work performed, that firm is running the second fraud.

Probably not. Victim lists circulate and are resold, and unsolicited approaches after a loss are fraudulent far more often than not. Legitimate firms do not cold-call fraud victims. Send us the details and we will give you an opinion at no charge, including when the opinion is that you do not need us either.

No. No private firm does, and claims to the contrary are a reliable indicator of fraud. We file through the same public reporting channels available to you. What we add is an evidence package structured so the receiving officer can act on it instead of closing it, which is a real and unglamorous difference.

Quickly. The window between a fraudulent transfer and funds reaching an uncooperative off-ramp is often hours. That said, a cold trail is not always a dead one: consolidation addresses stay visible, and cases have been advanced months later when an operation was disrupted elsewhere. Do not assume it is too late without asking.

Transaction hashes above everything else. One hash lets an analyst reconstruct the entire downstream flow. Beyond that: the addresses you sent to, screenshots of the platform showing your balance and any error, exported message history, and the details of how you were first approached.

Yes. Case data is encrypted at rest, access is scoped to the analyst assigned to your matter, and evidence files sit in private storage that is unreadable without a signed, short-lived link. We do not sell or share client data, and we do not publish case details without written consent.

Yes, and it usually produces a better outcome. Our reports are written to be handed to counsel. Where a civil route exists, such as a freezing injunction or a disclosure order against an exchange, the tracing work is what makes it possible in the first place.